ohsher Günsberg keeps stopping to smell the flowers. As we walk along Sydney’s eastern coastline, he cuts himself off mid-sentence to point out war greens (“cook it like kale or spinach, it’s really good”) and ginger (someone will be pinching it soon, he says , given ” that stuff is $20 a kilo”). We pause to touch the soft leaves of a woolly bush, which he uses in place of a Christmas tree at home, and admire the seed pods and bottle brushes that grow wild.
The TV host isn’t starting a new career as a botanist, but is trying to teach a lesson about the value of awareness – and how all it takes is slowing down to notice the things around us.
“Mindfulness is not buying a linen shirt and putting your crystals under the fucking moon, man. Too many people get turned off by that shit,” he groans. “Mindfulness is just noticing that all we have is this moment. This is it – you and me, here today.”
It’s a tool that has helped him tremendously over the years. You may know Günsberg best for his high-profile hosting gigs on network TV, where he was the shiny blonde face of prime-time shows like The Bachelor, The Masked Singer, and Australian Idol (the latter of which was back when he went by Andrew G). But behind the scenes, things were much less glamorous.
Günsberg was in New York with Channel V on September 11, an experience that left him with PTSD. His early years as a hard party music TV identity escalated into alcohol addiction. Along the way, he struggled with debilitating anxiety and suicidal thoughts – including “crippling” climate anxiety which manifested as paranoid delusions—and experienced a psychotic breakdown while living in Los Angeles.
There was a time in 2010, he says, when “the phone stopped ringing” because his behavior made him so difficult to work with.
And he came out the other side. Today, the 50-year-old is a devastated woman, loving father and stepfather, 14 years sober and living the peaceful kind of life that would once have been unrecognizable to himself. He has a lot of the hard-earned wisdom of an addict to share, plus the high-wattage charisma of a TV veteran—a combination that makes him good at talking convincingly about the big things in life.
I came to meet Günsberg on a sunny Wednesday morning in the parking lot of Clovelly Surf Life Saving Club. I expected him to be transported here by a publicist, but instead he arrives alone on a bright blue bicycle, the kind long enough to fit his wife and child on the back. As he sees it, why drive when you can drive? Exercise is another tool that Günsberg also considered essential to managing his mental health – although his relationship with it has become more complicated of late. That’s what we came here to talk about.
“I’ve had a lot of luck in my life. I was very happy with my career. I was very fortunate with my wife, who said, ‘Yes, good,’ and brought me into the life with which she built [her daughter] Georgia,” he says. “And I also got osteoarthritis in my 30s.”
Günsberg ran 10 kilometers “every day”, and often came here to hit the path from Bondi to Coogee and back. Then he started experiencing pain in his hip. When he couldn’t stretch it anymore, he went to a doctor who diagnosed him with osteoarthritis and told him in no uncertain terms to stop running. But it was such an “enormous part of my identity that I couldn’t accept what he said,” Günsberg says, so he ignored the advice and kept running – for many years.
In 2019, as his hip continued to get “worse and worse”, he finally accepted that he had to address the problem. After getting the opinions of four different orthopedic surgeons (“because I’m a stubborn Australian male”), Günsberg bit the bullet and got a hip replacement. This was meant to solve the problem – but instead his pain increased.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” he says of those first dark months after the operation. “It started to hurt more and more. It was at the point where I couldn’t catch my breath… I was in so much pain.”
The pain isolated him socially, affected his relationship — and brought back flashes of those intrusive suicidal thoughts. At a breaking point, he decided he wanted a nerve block — an injection of medicine that would essentially shut down all feeling in his lateral femoral cutaneous nerve, which runs through the pelvis, groin and into the thighs. He called his family doctor for a referral, who gave him one, but on the condition that he also first see a specialist for a second opinion. Günsberg agreed and found himself in a radiologist’s office, where he was shown an ultrasound that revealed his hip was mostly “fine.” It came as a shock.
“I had clear evidence in front of me that some of the pain – not everyone of the pain, but some some of the pain I experienced – was invented by my brain,” he says. It’s a common phenomenon: “When you’re in pain for a long time, your brain starts to become sensitive to signals, and it can start to read benign signals as dangerous, catastrophic.”
He decided against the nerve block and started seeing a pain psychologist instead, where he learned more about how the brain processes pain – including that the drugs can only do so much.
“When you’re in pain, the worst thing is to be told it’s all in your head,” he thinks. “But once I started accepting it… holy moly, it was empowering!”
Now Günsberg shares what he learned in a new documentary, Osher Günsberg: A World of Pain, in which he explores what science, medicine, technology and emerging alternative therapies are used to treat and manage chronic pain – including psychological approaches. Determined to get this story out there, he pitched and produced the documentary. He knows how desperate pain can make you and he wanted to give the one in five Australians struggling with chronic pain “hope that there is a way out”.
This is not the first time Günsberg has explored a difficult subject. He wrote about the dark years of his life in his warts-and-all 2018 memoir, and continues to ruminate on mental health and self-improvement on his twice-weekly podcast. But while it’s unusual for a presenter to be able to bridge the big commercial gigs and these much more raw conversations, he’s found that the two can happily co-exist.
“My job is to help people feel less alone,” he says. Some days that means opening up about his own battles on the podcast. Other days it’s “being part of telling a love story on TV” or “shouting ‘take it off!’ at a giant popcorn machine”.
As we walk back to the car park at Clovelly, Günsberg reflects on the journey he has been on. He still cringes at the thought of the man he was during his years in active addiction, but is comforted by the knowledge he gets to live the rest of his life “not being that guy”. And while he is delighted to have found pain psychology, it has been a wonderful tool, not a magic bullet.
“It hurts to talk and walk with you now, really. But I’m fine with that,” he says. “It’s not nearly as bad as it was. I’m generally around two to three [out of 10 on the pain scale] most days.”
He will never run again, but he does weights, pilates and rides his bright blue bike. And he’s very aware of how far he’s come in life in general – take his climate anxiety, for example, with which awareness has helped enormously.
“Ten years ago, there’s no fucking way I would have done this to you,” he says, gesturing around us. “Before, being by the sea and my head would flash ‘tsunamis’ and ‘bush fire’… I would see visions of it. It was terrible. I couldn’t be near the water.
“Because I did all the work – and I could never once believe it was true – here I am with you, looking at the birds, looking at the trees, looking at sandstone. Those thoughts are still there… But I’m like, you know what? It’s okay, because there is enough space in my brain to enjoy the breeze on my skin, and the feeling in my body to go for a walk.”
